Jauja review: beautiful faux-western from Lisandro Alonso

One might reasonably ponder The Searchers when sitting through the latest contemplative oddity from Argentinian master Lisandro Alonso. The film does, after all, concern an enigmatic wanderer looking for a young woman across swathes of unwelcoming wilderness. But the film is even weirder than John Ford's durable masterpiece. For most of its duration Jauja – named for a mythical paradise – suggests one of Michelangelo Antonioni's frustrating trips. In its later stages we swing into something weirder still. Journeys are dangerous things in arthouse faux-westerns. Ask Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Viggo Mortensen plays Gunnar Dinesen, a Danish engineer working with Argentinian forces in a hostile part of Patagonia. The film’s action (such as it is) kicks off when his 15-year-old daughter, after enduring one soldier’s advances, runs dangerously away with another. Dinesen seems, at first, like a civilised man among invading brutes. There is talk of extermination and occupation. As the protagonist advances into the inner nowhere, however, we begin to wonder – hello, Joseph Conrad – if any man can remain untainted when engaged in colonial enterprises.

Mind you, we probably stop wondering that after a while. The longer the film goes on the more it gives into vivid expressionist nightmare. There is talk of a soldier named Zuluaga (a pseudo-Kurtz?) who may have been turned by the hostile surroundings. We hear awful screams. We see bodies. Could the film be the autopsy of a deranged brain?

At times Jauja is too oblique for its own good. For all its proud oddness, the picture too often brandishes familiar tropes of post-colonial magic realism. But it is beautifully carried off. Mortensen has just the right class of vacant charisma for such a gouged-out protagonist and Timo Salminen's photography bathes every image in surprising lights. Mention should also be made of the fine score co-written by the star. Sadly, his collaborator, Buckethead, strips the project of some solemnity by being called Buckethead.